From Community to Collective: Institution and Agency in the Age of Social Networks

For each of us to contribute to the pool of collective wisdom, it is critical that the question we instead answer is: ‘What is in our collective interest? What is best for the nation as a whole?’ When we aggregate our multiple perspectives in answer to this question, we stand a good chance of getting to a better answer than any of us would alone. W

Unions and the state might have been outdated, but nothing was nurtured to replace them. Instead, all that was left was individual, atomised power: power that could only be mobilised by appeal to self-interest, and could only be expressed in the choice between options, not the power to shape those options.

The problem is rooted in the central falsehood that choice from a menu of options constitutes power. Ultimately, this serves to reinforce the idea that the limit of our agency as individuals is exactly that, as individuals, when the challenges we face are fundamentally collective, and require collective action in response.